Tuesday, 26 October 2004

Make up your own mind about this story, but this explanation makes a lot more sense to me than the one about Iraqi insurgents kidnapping someone who is both an Iraqi and has been doing nothing but helping the Iraqi people for decades. Her kidnapping does the Iraqi resistence no favours but it sure as hell helped out Phony Tony when he needed it. Given what happened to David Kelly I wouldn't put anything past our illustrious Prime Monster.

JUS [jihadunspun.com - Ewar] has learned from reliable sources close to the Mujahideen in Iraq that the kidnapping of Margaret Hassan is a operation concocted by British agents inside the country in conjunction with Margaret’s husband, in an effort to divert attention away from the American request for British troop deployment into the volatile area of Latifiyah – a move that has struck a raw nerve with the British public.

No group has claimed responsibility for Hassan capture. The 59 year old director of CARE international in Iraq was taken captive on her way to work on October 19, 2004 in a picture perfect operation. A videotape issued Oct. 22 and aired by Al-Jazeera showed her pleading for Britain to withdraw troops from Iraq.

What was curious from the beginning was the amount of details that husband Tahseen Ali Hassan was telling reporters about his wife’s capture just a few short hours after the incident and while authorities where still unclear what had taken place. To have obtained in-depth details so quickly of the events that actually took place raised suspicions about who was behind Hassan’s capture early on.

Sunni clerics who have been heading up the resistance in Fallujah has said previously that they were not responsible Hassan’s kidnapping and were calling for her release. Of the 150 foreigners captured by Mujahideen, few have been women with most being released and none have been killed, unlike the males who have been swiftly executed. Women are enjoined with special privileges in Islam and the Mujahideen are required to protect them under Shariah laws of Islam. This was also a tell tale sign from the start.

With Tony Blair facing increased pressure from the public, focusing Britain’s attention on the Hassan capture is a perfect political strategy to subdue the publics concern over the high risk of the Latifiyah deployment.

Wednesday, 20 October 2004

The agency is withholding a damning report that points at senior officials.

It is shocking: The Bush administration is suppressing a CIA report on 9/11 until after the election, and this one names names. Although the report by the inspector general's office of the CIA was completed in June, it has not been made available to the congressional intelligence committees that mandated the study almost two years ago.

"It is infuriating that a report which shows that high-level people were not doing their jobs in a satisfactory manner before 9/11 is being suppressed," an intelligence official who has read the report told me, adding that "the report is potentially very embarrassing for the administration, because it makes it look like they weren't interested in terrorism before 9/11, or in holding people in the government responsible afterward."

When I asked about the report, Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), ranking Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, said she and committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) sent a letter 14 days ago asking for it to be delivered. "We believe that the CIA has been told not to distribute the report," she said. "We are very concerned."

According to the intelligence official, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, release of the report, which represents an exhaustive 17-month investigation by an 11-member team within the agency, has been "stalled." First by acting CIA Director John McLaughlin and now by Porter J. Goss, the former Republican House member (and chairman of the Intelligence Committee) who recently was appointed CIA chief by President Bush.

The official stressed that the report was more blunt and more specific than the earlier bipartisan reports produced by the Bush-appointed Sept. 11 commission and Congress.

"What all the other reports on 9/11 did not do is point the finger at individuals, and give the how and what of their responsibility. This report does that," said the intelligence official. "The report found very senior-level officials responsible."

By law, the only legitimate reason the CIA director has for holding back such a report is national security. Yet neither Goss nor McLaughlin has invoked national security as an explanation for not delivering the report to Congress.

"It surely does not involve issues of national security," said the intelligence official.

"The agency directorate is basically sitting on the report until after the election," the official continued. "No previous director of CIA has ever tried to stop the inspector general from releasing a report to the Congress, in this case a report requested by Congress."

None of this should surprise us given the Bush administration's great determination since 9/11 to resist any serious investigation into how the security of this nation was so easily breached. In Bush's much ballyhooed war on terror, ignorance has been bliss.

Posted for all of you who think, mistakenly, that I hate Jewish people, I don't. I do hate fascists which is what Ariel Sharon, George Bush, Tony Blair and their corporate paymasters are. Hating Sharon and his government is NOT the same as hating Jewish people, I just want to make that crystal clear.

Traditional Jews are much troubled by the increasing frequency of references to Jewry and their supposed connection to Israel in political and media rhetoric such as was heard at the recent political conventions. Politicians seem to feel that this topic is of great interest to all American Jews and that to win the Jewish popular vote they must come out in favor of the Zionist state. Focusing on this issue only serves to inflame anti-Semitism, an historically essential component to the advancement of Zionism, while endangering traditional Jews who, as a result of the public,s mistaken belief that all Jews are Zionists, are wrongly and unfairly blamed for the deplorable actions of the secular state of Israel.

The relatively new concept of Zionism began only about one hundred years ago and since that time Torah-true Jewry has steadfastly opposed the Zionist ideology. This struggle is rooted in two convictions:

1. Zionism, by advocating a political and military end to the Jewish exile, denies the very essence of our Diaspora existence. We are in exile by Divine Decree and may emerge from exile solely via Divine Redemption. All human efforts to alter a metaphysical reality are doomed to end in failure and bloodshed. History has clearly borne out this teaching.

2. Zionism has not only denied our fundamental belief in Heavenly Redemption it has also created a pseudo-Judaism which views the essence of our identity to be a secular nationalism. Accordingly, Zionism and the Israeli state have consistently endeavored, via persuasion and coercion, to replace a Divine and Torah centered understanding of our people hood with an armed materialism.

Therefore, it is of the utmost urgency that Israel should not be seen as a Jewish State, rather as a Zionist State. The foundation of its existence is not Judaism but Zionist ideology and In fact endangers the welfare of Jews worldwide by linking Jews and Judaism to the actions of the Zionist State. Indeed, hatred of Jews is the very lifeblood and oxygen of the Zionist movement and their state, which are in diametric opposition to Judaism.

Jews are commanded by their religious laws and the standards of elementary civility to be loyal citizens in the country of their residence. This has been a basic norm of the Torah faith ever since the destruction of the holy Temple in Jerusalem and the exile of the Jewish People some two thousand years ago. The great biblical prophet, Jeremiah, proclaimed G-d's message to all the Diaspora: "Seek out the welfare of the city to which I have exiled you and pray for it to the Almighty, for through its welfare will you have welfare." (29:7). This has been a cornerstone of Jewish morality throughout history.

It is high time to set the record straight. Traditional Jews do not endorse the actions of the Zionist state nor do they favor political support of Israel. Traditional Jews strongly support and commend the efforts of the United States government and its dedicated administration who diligently work to prevent more calamities from occurring in the Middle East. Traditional Jews residing in America are loyal to one country -- the United States of America. Any connection of Jews to Israel only serves to fuel confusion and anti-Semitism.

Zionist Jews seek media attention amidst lurid and constant accusations of anti - Semitism against all and sundry to further their cause. Traditional Jews do not seek media or political publicity. Torah Jews desire simply to worship the Creator and live modest lives away from the glare of public hoopla.

This is typical, not just of Bush but of Blair as well. These cold-hearted scum-fucks have no idea what death is, have they ever lost a loved one? Would they be so cavalier with the lives of our troops if their own seed were in the armed forces? I very much doubt it! Their attitude towards life and death is that of spoiled ignorant children who know nothing of how 99% of the population live and die.

I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our 21-year-olds who wanted to be what they could be. On the eve of D-Day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear.

But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the weapons of mass destruction he can't seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man.

He does not mourn. He doesn't understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.

But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the 1,000 dead young men and women who wanted to be what they could be.

They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and fathers or wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life . . . they come to his desk as a political liability, which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq.

How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as he knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled plan for the war's aftermath has made of his mission-accomplished a disaster. He does not regret that, rather than controlling terrorism, his war in Iraq has licensed it. So he never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought this war of his choice.

He wanted to go to war and he did. He had not the mind to perceive the costs of war, or to listen to those who knew those costs. He did not understand that you do not go to war when it is one of the options but when it is the only option; you go not because you want to but because you have to.

Yet this president knew it would be difficult for Americans not to cheer the overthrow of a foreign dictator. He knew that much. This president and his supporters would seem to have a mind for only one thing -- to take power, to remain in power, and to use that power for the sake of themselves and their friends.

A war will do that as well as anything. You become a wartime leader. The country gets behind you. Dissent becomes inappropriate. And so he does not drop to his knees, he is not contrite, he does not sit in the church with the grieving parents and wives and children. He is the president who does not feel. He does not feel for the families of the dead, he does not feel for the 35 million of us who live in poverty, he does not feel for the 40 percent who cannot afford health insurance, he does not feel for the miners whose lungs are turning black or for the working people he has deprived of the chance to work overtime at time-and-a-half to pay their bills - it is amazing for how many people in this country this president does not feel.

It makes you wonder how Sharon wields so much power, the Israeli lobby in Washington has considerable power but this smells like something different. Mike Rivero of whatreallyhappened.com makes a good point when he says: "Occam's Razor: Israel helped the US pull off 9-11, then turned around and blackmailed the US Government with that secret. Don't believe me? Go back to September 2001, and look at how Israel's arrogance and demands shot upwards in the months afterwards."

In the Middle East maelstrom, all parties acknowledge one fixed point: forceful US diplomatic engagement is essential if the central Israel-Palestine conflict is ever to be resolved.

But far from taking the lead over the past four years, the Bush administration has been mostly led by the nose. The man responsible for this extraordinary feat is Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon.

Mr Sharon was running a "war on terror" when George Bush was still running a baseball team in Texas. So not surprisingly, perhaps, it is Mr Bush who, since 9/11, has followed Mr Sharon's example rather than the other way round. In his many visits to the Bush White House, Mr Sharon has exerted telling influence on America's post-9/11 agenda. Knowing Mr Bush was bent on war in Iraq, he helpfully highlighted Saddam Hussein's links to terrorist groups and financial aid to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. Now he eggs on the US in its confrontations with Israel's enemies, Iran and Syria.

It was Israel that, as far back as 1967, perfected the concept of pre-emptive war. It is Mr Sharon, not Mr Bush, who is the present master of the targeted assassination and mass detention without trial. It is Israeli military tactics that the US now apes in places like Falluja and Najaf.

Deeming him unreliable, Mr Sharon refused to deal with the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat - and Mr Bush followed suit. His insistence on absolute security as a precondition for negotiations and his contemptuous dismissal of contrary UN and European views won support - and a broader, damaging emulation - in Washington.

Most of all, Mr Sharon's basic contention, that the homeland is under attack by ruthless forces bent on its utter destruction, has been adopted wholesale by Mr Bush and applied to the US itself. These politics of fear now form a central plank in his re-election platform.

Brent Scowcroft, the national security veteran, recently described Mr Bush as "mesmerised" by Israel's leader. And for the most part, it does indeed appear that Sharon policy is Bush policy, rather than vice versa.

Friday, 15 October 2004

When James Woolsey resigned as Director of Central Intelligence on December 28, 1994, everyone except President Clinton and his closest advisers, particularly the National Security Council's intelligence expert George Tenet, and Eastern European expert Jennone Walker, were caught by surprise. Woolsey had done the necessary damage control on the Ames spying scandal - punishing lesser Agency lights for the sins of their earlier superiors - and it was now time to move on to help keep people in the dark about what was going on.

Of course, the former DCI put all the spin he could on his resignation, acting as if he had not had the ear and the eye of the White House while doing his job, but it was just to throw the press and the public off about what he had been up to - what the President had done nearly a year earlier by forcing White House attorney Bernie Nussbaum to resign over the snafu about the whereabouts of deceased Vince Foster's papers, and hiring the ignorant Lloyd Cutler in this place to keep the spin going. Woolsey and Clinton had worked hand and glove, though through the necessary intermediaries to keep secret the whole operation, to make sure that they came up with a mutually beneficial solution to their problems - the President saving his Presidency, and the DCI his Agency.

The closeness of the DCI and the President in Agency decision-making had been demonstrated when Woolsey reprimanded in various degrees 11 of its officials, only four of whom were still working for it, and all but one in the Operations Directorate, over Aldrich 'Rick' Ames's decade-long spying for Moscow while serving the Agency in a counterintelligence capacity. The 486-page classified report that Inspector General Frederick Hitz had released on the scandal called for disciplining 26 Agency officers, past and present, including former DCIs William Casey, Judge William Wester, and Robert Gates.

They, and personnel in the Office of Security except for the one coordinating the polygraphs given Ames avoided censure, however, Woolsey claiming that they were too far removed from the worst failures regarding Ames to justify reprimands. The scandal had started with DCI Casey, now deceased,delegating Agency authority to the NSC's Oliver North so that he could carry out his own agenda for ending the Cold War - what retired DDO Clair George, the recepient of a harsh reprimand, had allowed without any supervision. It hardly made sense to reprimand the deceased DCI, and the reprimand of George had already been greatly softened by President G. H.W. Bush's pardon of him when he left office in 1992. Another recipient of a harsh reprimand was Richard Stolz, George's successor as DDO who effectively covered up the Iran-Contra scandal by denying special counsel Lawrence Walsh even the most elementary cooperation in this investigations. (See Firewall, p. 210ff.)

These important decisions by DCI Woolsey, who worked at the pleasure of the President, could not have been made without Clinton's approval.

Woolsey, by directing his censures against DO officials, was showing that much more than just spying by Ames was involved. To see this, one must realize that intelligence work basically calls for the collection of information, safeguarding it for use by proper authorities, and seeing that risks of its disclosure to unauthorized persons are discovered before they can act, or at least are quickly caught after they have done so. These functions are carried out by personnel engaged in espionage, security, and counterintelligence respectively, though agencies and departments engaged in any one of these functions have to be concerned about the others in order to best protect their secrets.

In sum, spies are not expected to be security people and counterspies too, and they are only supposed to become so when there are apparently obvious betrayals within their own ranks. When this happens, everyone concerned has to be worried about the vetting system involved in recruiting candidates having broken down, a good agent having gone wrong because of some inducement material or ideological, or the system having been penetrated because of some collective or individual failure. Usually, though, it's just up to the counterspies to catch espionage agents working for some foreign party.

This was well illustrated, for example, when Kim Philby of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (SIS)was apparently caught spying for the Soviets. Philby was so effective as a spy because he was in charge most of the time for the espionage agency's internal counterintelligence - what gave him an ideal place for rescuing Soviet spies risking exposure, and for fixing Western spies around the globe who were telling tales on their colleagues and/or threatening to defect to the West. The famous escape of fellow spies Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess to Moscow in 1951 were the best examples of the former, while the execution of Konstantin Volkov, the hurried defection of Poland's UB agent Michael Goleniewski, and the trashing of defector Igor Gouzenko are good examples of the latter.

After the defection of Maclean and Burgess, though, there was little that happened to SIS beyond the retirement of its long serving Director General, Stewart Menzies. No one in SIS was fired or received letters of reprimand. All the people who had worked along side Philby for years escaped without any rebuke because it was not their job to find spies like Philby. (For a glimpse of Philby's spying on his fellow spies, see Nigel West, and Oleg Tsarev, The Crown Jewels, Appendix II, "The Philby Reports", pp. 294-345.) If the Philby case had been like Ames's, literally hundreds of SIS agents would have been fired or received reprimands. The reason why they didn't is because they had little reason to believe that Philby was a KGB spy, much less its most important one.

So why were Ames's superiors, especially Milton Bearden, the other still active operative to receive a harsh reprimand, treated so? The answer seems to be that they were too happy with their violations of law, both domestic and international, and stated government policy in pursuing Palme's assassination, and the end of the Soviet Union while ignoring the fallout of their reckless program, especially when it came to the fate of the double agents to trigger crucial steps in the operation, and NATO soldiers involved in Anchor Express Exercise to help carry it out. After all, Webster, when he was FBI Director, had refused to allow the Bureau to take part in the new interagency Counterterrorism Center (CTC) for fear that its "... 'pro-active' stance might involve the U. S. in assassinating terrorists, which was banned by executive order." (Quoted from Mark Riebling, p. 368.)

Bearden, another Yale graduate, had been deputy chief of the Agency's Soviet division when the assassination of Olof Palme occurred, and had taken over as its head several years later when the Berlin Wall came down. From right after the assassination until July 1991, he had been directing from Pakistan the Mujahedin's campaign to oust the Soviets from Afghanistan, explaining why he was unaware of what was happening to all the Agency's double agents in the Soviet Union. Bearden may have even warned Ames that he was suspected of being a mole - what turned out to be, it seems, a "poison fax" to the Senate Intelligence Committee - satisfied by what had happened in Stockholm at the end of February 1986, and little suspecting that Ames really was one. Little wonder that Bearden went berserk when he learned of his reprimand. (See, e. g., James Adams, Sellout, pp. 258-9.)

The retiring Bearden's outrage was increased when Frank Anderson, the chief of the Agency's Near East division, and John MacGaffin, DDO Ted Price's deputy, gave him a plaque for his years of service at a good-bye ceremony at the Bonn station, only for them both to draw Woolsey's ire for this apparent insubordination. He said that they would either have to accept demotions or retire. They choseretirement. While David Wise has compared Woolsey's behavior to that of the infamous Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny (p. 312), the DCI was answering his critics that he was being too easy on the offenders.

The only active personnel reprimanded because they did not devote enough resources to catching Ames when they should have in 1990, and agreed to stay on were DDO Price, and ADDO Thomas Tweeten. They knew from the Counter Intelligence Center all about how Dewey Clarridge's CTC had been misused by the NSC's Oliver North and his Operations Sub-Group of theTerrorist Incident Working Group to carry out the most dangerous operations, especially Operation Tree, thanks the National Security Decesion Directive NSDD-207 that President Reagan had signed in January 1986. Moreover, if Price and Tweeten have gone after Ames during 1990-1, the assassinations of former Leningrad station chief Freddie Woodruff, leading Palme assassin Viktor Gunnarsson, and Mrs. Catherine Miller, mother of fallguy L. C. Underwood's ex-fiancée Kay Weden, would not have occurred - what they now had to clean up.

Woolsey made it fairly clear that the Agency had failed in its mission, and its responsibilities in the Ames case when he made an unnannounced farewell speech to Agency employees on January 9, 1995. "The CIA had to work in ways that were consistent with American values," Wise wrote, a veiled rebuke of Palme's illegal assassination by officials who had no such authority while those who did looked silently on. As for the liberties they allowed the mole in making his case to the public, Woolsey reminded his audience: "You are in the job of stealing secrets....We do our very best to hide these acts from all and sundry. That is what we are about." (Quoted from Nightmover, p. 314.) And when Woolsey said all, he meant all.

To clear the way for Price and Tweeten to do what needed to be done, President Clinton nominated Air Force General Michael P. C. Carns to be Woolsey's successor. While an experienced fighter pilot, and a good manager of men - having obtained a Harvard MBA along the way to becoming the Air Force's Vice Chief of Staff - Carns had no intelligence experience, a deficiency that Clinton hoped to remedy by making the most knowledgeable intelligence expert on the NSC, George Tenet, the Agency's new DD in place of Admiral William Studeman. The former, most knowledgeable Chief of Naval Intelligence had complemented Woolsey's efforts in punishing the Agency for its sins of omission and commission in the Ames case by canceling an awards ceremony for the mole hunters after formal invitations had already been mailed. Studeman didn't want any congratulated for the debacle. (Pete Earley, Confessions of a Spy, p. 336)

The President went ballistic, though, when now presidential counsel Abner Mikva informed him that he would have to withdraw the nomination because Carns had not paid Social Security taxes for a Filipino houseboy he employed: "Why are you doing this?" Clinton raged. "How can you do this?" (Quoted from Bob Woodward, Shadow, p. 278) Still, Clinton had to heed Mikva's recommendation, and the very same day, nominated the closest person he could think of like Carns, the DSOD John Deutch, to become the next DCI. The result would be much like when President Carter appointed another Admiral, Stansfield Turner, to be the Director back in 1977 - the DO running the Agency behind the DCI's back.

I personally became aware of this when it finally decided to act upon the complaints I had directed to the President and the intelligence community about its handling to the Dallas assassination of President Kennedy, especially former President Nixon's role in it. Of course, by this time, President Clinton had the personnel on the ground, headed by Ambassador Elizabeth Frawley Bagley, to take my measure if I continued to cause trouble and embarrassment for America's secret government.

I had not only prepared an outline of the proposed book but also sent copies of it to some publishers in the hope that they would be interested in it. Just before I left for America on November 13, 1994 - what resulted in the showdown with Portuguese immigration about my alleged illegal stay, thanks apparently to input by the Legal Attaché at the Lisbon Embassy - I received a rejection by Simon and Schuster, along with a copy of the Literary Agents in the field, and advice that I hire one to help place the project with a publisher.

While staying with my sister in Connecticut, I started calling them in the hope of finding one interested in taking up the proposal. I must say that it was one of the most chilling experiences in my life. All I had to do was to explain that I thought the JFK assassination was the result of a high-government conspiracy, involving former Vice President Richard Nixon, DCI Richard Helms, his 'Executive Action' operative William King Harvey, etc., than the party at the other end of the line either hung up or clammed up. While I never was even able to arrange an appointment with a literary agent to explain the project further, I finally persuaded a cousin in the field, working for the well-known Elaine Markson Literary Agency Inc., to look at my proposal, and I went back to Portugal with every intention of pursuing the matter further.

In fact, while I was in the States, I called the Troup County Archives In La Grange, Georgia - and, yes, I do believe that my calls and mail were, and are being monitored by the CIA - to obtain copies of all the stories it had regarding Captain Glenn Hyde's ill-fated U-2 flight over Cuba on November 19, 1963 - what triggered the showdown in Dallas with the President. This showed that I was still vigorously pursuing the project, and the new information concerned Hyde being apparently posthumously awarded with the Distinguished Flying Cross for a flight he took on January 19, 1963, and his Air Medal Oak Leaf Clusters did not include the flight which, it seems, killed him. In short, Hyde got nothing for his apparent demise.

After I returned to Portugal, I received an envelope full of photo copies of the stories about Hyde from Archivist Shirley W. Bowen, and shortly thereafter, I believe in early February 1995, I received my first ricin attack after having had dinner at the Thai restaurant in Caldas da Rainha the night before - what I came to think, after a decade of experience, was the handiwork of Ambassador Bagley in Lisbon. The attacks always started with hot flushes, followed by violent nausea, and diarrhea, the loss of motor control, and a drop in blood pressure which risked falling into unconsciousness - what finally happened when I immigrated to Sweden. They regularly happened after I dined at the restaurant - what only a naive, simple-minded conspiracy theorist like myself would have tolerated to the point of death.

To end any suspicion that the White House sanctioned any such action, much less was involved in it, National Security Adviser Tony Lake ordered in March 1995 that the Justice Department seek a criminal prosecution of the OD's Robert Baer for trying to assassinate Iraq's Saddam Hussein in the early 1990s. (Thomas Powers, Intelligence Wars, pp. 373-4) What Baer was attempting was contrary to the executive order that Reagan issued in the wake of the Stockholm shooting on May 12, 1986, rescinding the license to kill anyone deemed to be a 'terrorist'. "When your own outfit is trying to put you in jail," Baer explained to Powers, "it's time to go." Baer went on to write his own book, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism, an exposé of the frustrations of a 'pro-active' agent, trying to do his job in an era of political correctness.

Of course, the search for criminal prosecutions against cowboys in the OD should have been directed against the officials Woolsey had reprimanded, but the Bureau would not permit it because of fears of blowback at its expense. The former DCI had earlier said that other moles would be discovered, and Director Louis Freeh feared that any criminal investigations would lead to its Robert Hanssen. He had called his handler Mr. Fefelov in the Soviet Embassy on August 19, 1986, and the conversation had been recorded. Once the Bureau people who had worked with Hanssen in Operation Courtship heard the tape, they immediately recognized his voice - what Freeh wanted to avoid at all costs, and explaining why it took another eight years to catch Hanssen.

Lake's effort had been to give the White House an alibi for going after me, while DDO Price and ADDO Tweeten cleaned up the mess surrounding the assassination of Viktor Gunnarsson, the leading suspect in the Palme one, on December 4, 1993 in Salisbury, N. C. Once his body was finally found five weeks later, far away in Deep Gap, sheriff's officers and the State's Special Bureau of Investigation worked hard to build a circumstantial case against former police officer L. C. Underwood for the murder. And almost all murder convictions rest on nothing more substantial as there are hardly ever witnesses to first degree murders.

The trouble with the prosecution's attempts against Underwood was that he had a good alibi for not being the murderer - being elsewhere when it allegedly took place - and its attempts to prove otherwise led nowhere. The police, for example, tried to prove that the .22 caliber shots which killed Gunnarsson could be fired from Underwood's rifle of the same caliber, but they couldn't. Then prosecutors looked everywhere for the .38 caliber pistol, apparently the one Underwood was issued when he worked for the town police, but he had evidence that he had turned it in before the shooting. Still, investigators looked everywhere for it, digging up places which could be connected to Underwood in the hope of finding it, but to no avail. Prosecutors even persuaded a female reporter, working for The Salisbury Post whose Jonathan Weaver was turning out stories so prejudicial to Underwood's innocence, to spy on Underwood during their dates in the hope he would reveal something about the murders of Gunnarsson and Mrs. Miller. Underwood never said anything helpful to prosecutors.

Given this embarrassing lack of success, the CIA was finally forced to help the prosecution's case. While Underwood was a police officer, he had developed Rex Allen Keller as an informant. In 1994, though, Keller was convicted of food stamp fraud, and sentenced to time in federal prison. While there, Keller developed all kinds of connections to people in counterintelligence, and knowledgeable about the Gunnarsson case, as he explained in a October 6, 1994 letter to Underwood:

"I have some good news for you, but all your questions are going to have to wait until I get home. Don't write and ask about what I'm going to tell you, just trust me and wait. They censor all incoming mail but not outgoing. This is about your case. To begin with, as I told you, we have a variety of people here. I have been having coffee with a guy that works for the NSA. Guess what? Your boy, Viktor Gunnarsson came up in one of his conversations. In short, you will not be charged, it was a pro hit. He didn't pop the Swedish P. M. for us, but for Russia. The hit on Gunnarsson was done to save a government from being embarrassed. I'll explain more when I get home. Do not write and ask any questions! There are quite a few CIA boys here. A cellmate of mine that left last week was one of Oliver North's boys and he and this NSA guy knew each other from 'jobs' in Salvador and the Mid-East. Just maintain as you have been and everything will come out OK."

Well, everything did not turn out okay for either Underwood or me, as we shall see in the next articles.

Since September 11 Britain has been warned of the 'inevitability' of catastrophic terrorist attack. But has the danger been exaggerated? A major new TV documentary claims that the perceived threat is a politically driven fantasy - and al-Qaida a dark illusion.

Since the attacks on the United States in September 2001, there have been more than a thousand references in British national newspapers, working out at almost one every single day, to the phrase "dirty bomb". There have been articles about how such a device can use ordinary explosives to spread lethal radiation; about how London would be evacuated in the event of such a detonation; about the Home Secretary David Blunkett's statement on terrorism in November 2002 that specifically raised the possibility of a dirty bomb being planted in Britain; and about the arrests of several groups of people, the latest only last month, for allegedly plotting exactly that.

Starting next Wednesday, BBC2 is to broadcast a three-part documentary series that will add further to what could be called the dirty bomb genre. But, as its title suggests, The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear takes a different view of the weapon's potential.

"I don't think it would kill anybody," says Dr Theodore Rockwell, an authority on radiation, in an interview for the series. "You'll have trouble finding a serious report that would claim otherwise." The American department of energy, Rockwell continues, has simulated a dirty bomb explosion, "and they calculated that the most exposed individual would get a fairly high dose [of radiation], not life-threatening." And even this minor threat is open to question. The test assumed that no one fled the explosion for one year.

During the three years in which the "war on terror" has been waged, high-profile challenges to its assumptions have been rare. The sheer number of incidents and warnings connected or attributed to the war has left little room, it seems, for heretical thoughts. In this context, the central theme of The Power of Nightmares is riskily counter-intuitive and provocative. Much of the currently perceived threat from international terrorism, the series argues, "is a fantasy that has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services, and the international media." The series' explanation for this is even bolder: "In an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power."

Adam Curtis, who wrote and produced the series, acknowledges the difficulty of saying such things now. "If a bomb goes off, the fear I have is that everyone will say, 'You're completely wrong,' even if the incident doesn't touch my argument. This shows the way we have all become trapped, the way even I have become trapped by a fear that is completely irrational."

So controversial is the tone of his series, that trailers for it were not broadcast last weekend because of the killing of Kenneth Bigley. At the BBC, Curtis freely admits, there are "anxieties". But there is also enthusiasm for the programmes, in part thanks to his reputation. Over the past dozen years, via similarly ambitious documentary series such as Pandora's Box, The Mayfair Set and The Century of the Self, Curtis has established himself as perhaps the most acclaimed maker of serious television programmes in Britain. His trademarks are long research, the revelatory use of archive footage, telling interviews, and smooth, insistent voiceovers concerned with the unnoticed deeper currents of recent history, narrated by Curtis himself in tones that combine traditional BBC authority with something more modern and sceptical: "I want to try to make people look at things they think they know about in a new way."

The Power of Nightmares seeks to overturn much of what is widely believed about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. The latter, it argues, is not an organised international network. It does not have members or a leader. It does not have "sleeper cells". It does not have an overall strategy. In fact, it barely exists at all, except as an idea about cleansing a corrupt world through religious violence.

Curtis' evidence for these assertions is not easily dismissed. He tells the story of Islamism, or the desire to establish Islam as an unbreakable political framework, as half a century of mostly failed, short-lived revolutions and spectacular but politically ineffective terrorism. Curtis points out that al-Qaida did not even have a name until early 2001, when the American government decided to prosecute Bin Laden in his absence and had to use anti-Mafia laws that required the existence of a named criminal organisation.

Curtis also cites the Home Office's own statistics for arrests and convictions of suspected terrorists since September 11 2001. Of the 664 people detained up to the end of last month, only 17 have been found guilty. Of these, the majority were Irish Republicans, Sikh militants or members of other groups with no connection to Islamist terrorism. Nobody has been convicted who is a proven member of al-Qaida.

In fact, Curtis is not alone in wondering about all this. Quietly but increasingly, other observers of the war on terror have been having similar doubts. "The grand concept of the war has not succeeded," says Jonathan Eyal, director of the British military thinktank the Royal United Services Institute. "In purely military terms, it has been an inconclusive war ... a rather haphazard operation. Al-Qaida managed the most spectacular attack, but clearly it is also being sustained by the way that we rather cavalierly stick the name al-Qaida on Iraq, Indonesia, the Philippines. There is a long tradition that if you divert all your resources to a threat, then you exaggerate it."

Wednesday, 13 October 2004

If Ariel Sharon isn't the incarnation of all that is corrupt and evil in the human soul then I don't know what is. The guy is seriously giving this species a bad name...

by Uri Avnery

When Ariel Sharon announced his plan for "unilateral disengagement," the media reported that the Peace Now movement was preparing a big public campaign in support. The Prime Minister's office asked them to desist, fearing that such a campaign would cause the extreme right to oppose it.

Peace Now was not the only "leftist" group that waxed enthusiastic about the plan. The chiefs of the Labor Party declared that it was really their own plan and that, therefore, it was their duty to join the government and help Sharon to implement it.

I was one of the very few who immediately raised their voice against the plan. I argued that it was really a right-wing plan for annexing most of the West Bank, burying the peace process and deceiving public opinion in Israel and abroad.

I was certain of this, because I know Sharon. I have been watching the man for 50 years and have written three biographical essays about him. I know what he thinks, and I know how he operates.

Now Dov Weisglass has confirmed everything I said and more. In an interview with Ha'aretz, he stated that the sole aim of the plan was to "freeze" the peace process. The real purpose of the "disengagement" is to block negotiations with the Palestinians for dozens of years and to prevent any discussion about the West Bank, while at the same time extending the Israeli settlements in a way that will put an end to any possibility of a future Palestinian state.

Dov Weisglass is not just anybody. He reminds one of the "eminence grise" ("gray cardinal"), the secretary of Cardinal Richelieu, the prime minister of France 400 years ago. It was said at the time that it was the secretary who was really in charge behind the scenes.

Weisglass has been the legal advisor and a close personal friend of Sharon for decades. He is Sharon's special emissary for delicate missions, the man who can twist Condoleezza Rice around his little finger. In Sharon 's menagerie, he is the fox.

His frank statement is the final word. It puts to shame not only the simple souls of Peace Now and the less simple souls like Shimon Peres & Co. of the Labor Party, but also George Bush and the other world leaders who for months have taken this piece of deceit as a serious peace plan. (Poor Colin Powell called it "historic.")

Weisglass' disclosure was vying for media attention with the "stretcher case" – a story that also reveals Sharon 's methods. It might have been funny, if it did not threaten such tragic results.

Sharon wants to destroy UNRWA, the special United Nations Relief and Works Agency that moderates the misery of the four million Palestinian refugees. It is a big organization with some 25,000 employees, including teachers, social workers and physicians, almost all of them, of course, Palestinians. It provides the refugees with food, education, health services and, in case of need, a roof over their head. Without it, the refugees would long ago have descended into an abyss of hunger and despair. At present, while our army is destroying whole Gaza neighborhoods and their infrastructure, UNRWA is providing food, tents and medical care to needy Palestinians who are not refugees.

The very existence of this organization disturbs Sharon and his generals, who want to break the resistance of the Palestinians by turning their life into hell. After working systematically to smash the Palestinian National Authority, they are now trying to crush UNRWA. As reported in the media, Sharon ordered his generals to supply the Foreign Office's propaganda department with secret army photos, in order to prove that UNRWA cooperates with the "terror organizations."

The next day, all the Israeli TV channels displayed aerial reconnaissance photos showing a Qassam rocket launcher being loaded into an UNRWA ambulance. That was the beginning of a wild campaign against the organization. Israeli diplomats in New York demanded that the Danish UNRWA director, Peter Hansen, be fired.

Two days later, the whole thing came apart. UNRWA claimed that the man in the picture was not carrying a rocket launcher but a stretcher. The generals first issued a denial, than stuttered, then half-heartedly admitted that, perhaps, a deplorable mistake had occurred: the professional analysts in the army intelligence department, lowly sergeants or second lieutenants, may have misinterpreted the pictures.

This answer needs investigating. Did the analysts lie or did they believe what they said? Each possibility is worse than the other.

This is sooooo typical! The government LIE to us to MANIPULATE us into supporting their WAR OF AGRESSION in Iraq. We didn't, they did what they wanted to anyway, and they treat us like idiot children incapable of understanding the "nature of the threat". They use their "official secrets act" and "D Notices" to keep us in the dark and to COVER THEIR LYING, WARMONGERING, ARSES! The lies are exposed and still they cling, like ship-wrecked rats on driftwood, to the notion that Iraq was a threat. The truth is that they have other plans entirely, plans that will never make it into the public domain because they involve the subjugation and empoverishment of a large percentage of the human race. They deny it because they know damn well that if the truth were made known to the public, that the same Great British Public would be on their way to Westminster within the hour as a lynch-mob!!

Two years after Tony Blair put the claim at the centre of the Government's case for military action to disarm Saddam, the Government disclosed that John Scarlett, the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), had withdrawn the intelligence on which it was based.

Last July, the Butler inquiry into pre-war intelligence failings disclosed that intelligence sources in Iraq on the 45-minute claim and the production of biological weapons must be treated as unsafe.

Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, told the Commons yesterday that, as a result of further investigation by MI6, Mr Scarlett had formally withdrawn two lines of intelligence reporting relating to the 45-minute claim and a "liaison service", which was responsible for a false claim that Saddam was producing a biological weapons agent.

The dossier was drawn up by Mr Scarlett, who at the time was head of the Joint Intelligence Committee. He was later promoted by Mr Blair to head of the SIS.

Downing Street last night rejected calls for Mr Blair to apologise to the Commons, even though he had told MPs on Sept 24, 2002 that the intelligence on Saddam's WMD was "extensive, detailed and authoritative", and that the Iraqi leader had active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons that could be activated within 45 minutes.

Last month, Mr Blair told the Labour Party conference that he could apologise for the information that turned out to be wrong but could not apologise for removing Saddam.

Downing Street said yesterday that there was no need for Mr Blair to repeat that apology to the Commons.

Charles Kennedy, the Liberal Democrat leader, wrote to Mr Blair last night, urging him to make a Commons statement on the report of the Iraq Survey Group that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He said the report "shows beyond doubt that we went to war on a false premise".

In the Commons, Mr Straw rejected a demand by Gary Streeter, the Conservative foreign affairs spokesman, that Mr Blair should now apologise to the country "for the way this intelligence was conveyed by the Government to the country".

Mr Straw said the criticism of Mr Blair was "completely unjustified". The September 2002 dossier accurately reflected the views of the Joint Intelligence Committee at the time.

Tuesday, 12 October 2004

Without going out of my way to encourage vitriolic attacks from supporters of the bastard government of Ariel Sharon in Tel Aviv, this story is important because the attacks in the Sinai had the conspiracy hairs on the back of my neck tingling like you wouldn't believe. Look, this may be hard to accept but the only ones who benefit from these bombings are the extreme facsist/Zionist elements within the Israeli government. If you can't see that then there's little hope that you can see past your political leanings, if that's the case the you should find another webpage to read... This is NOT about religion or the right of a people to exist, it is about a violent government that is a scar on the face of this planet and a disgrace to every human being living upon it.

The suicide bombings in Sinai have triggered a wave of conspiracy theories in Egypt, where many believe Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the Jews were behind the attacks.

Several Egyptians interviewed over the past few days on Arab satellite stations said they did not believe Muslim terrorists were capable of launching such massive attacks. Most interviewees agreed Israel was the only beneficiary of the bombings and claimed once again that the Jews were behind the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington.

"Analyses based on conspiracy theories are spreading not only on the level of the man on the street, but also among political and intellectual circles," he said.

General (Ret.) Muhammad Abdel Fattah Omar, a former senior official with the Egyptian Ministry of Interior, which is responsible for the country's security services, was one of the first Egyptians to accuse Israel of masterminding the attacks.

"In each operation, we should first try to find out who benefits from it," he said. "Israel is the only party that benefits from the Sinai attacks. The Israelis and their agents are the only ones who are able to enter this area without difficulty."

Cool! More Big Brother bullshit invading our lives. Attention all snoopy-drawers who may be reading this, you people SUCK! You're fascists who have got nothing better to do than spy on us and try and make us afraid because that's the only thing that gives you your power. Your are not protecting us you are our mortal enemies, and we're on to you scumbags!

Amid the torrent of jabber in internet chat rooms -- flirting by QTpie and BoogieBoy, arguments about politics and horror flicks -- are terrorists plotting their next move?

The government certainly isn't discounting the possibility. It's taking the idea seriously enough to fund a yearlong study on chat room surveillance under an anti-terrorism program.

Today's the Day. A Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute computer science professor hopes to develop mathematical models that can uncover structure within the scattershot traffic of online public forums.

Chat rooms are the highly popular and freewheeling areas on the internet where people with self-created nicknames discuss just about anything: teachers, Kafka, cute boys, politics, love, root canals. They are also places where malicious hackers have been known to trade software tools, stolen passwords and credit card numbers. The Pew Internet & American Life Project estimates 28 million Americans have visited internet chat rooms.

Trying to monitor the sea of traffic on all the chat channels would be like assigning a police officer to listen in on every conversation on the sidewalk -- virtually impossible.

Instead of rummaging through megabytes of messages, RPI professor Bulent Yener will use mathematical models in search of patterns in the chatter. Downloading data from selected chat rooms, Yener will track the times that messages were sent, creating a statistical profile of the traffic.

If, for instance, RatBoi and bowler1 consistently send messages within seconds of each other in a crowded chat room, you could infer that they were speaking to one another amid the "noise" of the chat room.

"For us, the challenge is to be able to determine, without reading the messages, who is talking to whom," Yener said. In search of "hidden communities," Yener also wants to check messages for certain keywords that could reveal something about what's being discussed in groups.

The $157,673 grant comes from the National Science Foundation's Approaches to Combat Terrorism program. It was selected in coordination with the nation's intelligence agencies.

The NSF's Leland Jameson said the foundation judged the proposal strictly on its broader scientific merit, leaving it to the intelligence community to determine its national security value. Neither the CIA nor the FBI would comment on the grant, with a CIA spokeswoman citing the confidentiality of sources and methods.

Security officials know al-Qaida and other terrorist groups use the internet for everything from propaganda to offering tips on kidnapping. But it's not clear if terrorists rely much on chat rooms for planning and coordination.

Monday, 11 October 2004

A powerful "old guard" faction in the Central Intelligence Agency has launched an unprecedented campaign to undermine the Bush administration with a battery of damaging leaks and briefings about Iraq.

The White House is incensed by the increasingly public sniping from some senior intelligence officers who, it believes, are conducting a partisan operation to swing the election on November 2 in favour of John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, and against George W Bush.

Jim Pavitt, a 31-year CIA veteran who retired as a departmental chief in August, said that he cannot recall a time of such "viciousness and vindictiveness" in a battle between the White House and the agency.

John Roberts, a conservative security analyst, commented bluntly: "When the President cannot trust his own CIA, the nation faces dire consequences."

Relations between the White House and the agency are widely regarded as being at their lowest ebb since the hopelessly botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by CIA-sponsored exiles under President John F Kennedy in 1961.

There is anger within the CIA that it has taken all the blame for the failings of pre-war intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons programmes.

Former senior CIA officials argue that so-called "neo-conservative" hawks such as the vice president, Dick Cheney, the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, and his number three at the defence department, Douglas Feith, have prompted the ill-feeling by demanding "politically acceptable" results from the agency and rejecting conclusions they did not like. Yet Colin Powell, the less hardline secretary of state, has also been scathing in his criticism of pre-war intelligence briefings.

The leaks are also a shot across the bows of Porter Goss, the agency's new director and a former Republican congressman. He takes over with orders from the White House to end the in-fighting and revamp the troubled spy agency as part of a radical overhaul of the American intelligence world.

Bill Harlow, the former CIA spokesman who left with the former director George Tenet in July, acknowledged that there had been leaks from within the agency. "The intelligence community has been made the scapegoat for all the failings over Iraq," he said. "It deserves some of the blame, but not all of it. People are chafing at that, and that's the background to these leaks."

Fighting to defend their patch ahead of the future review, anti-Bush CIA operatives have ensured that Iraq remains high on the election campaign agenda long after Republican strategists such as Karl Rove, the President's closest adviser, had hoped that it would fade from the front pages.

In the latest clash, a senior former CIA agent revealed that Mr Cheney "blew up" when a report into links between the Saddam regime and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist behind the kidnappings and beheadings of hostages in Iraq, including the Briton Kenneth Bigley, proved inconclusive.

Thursday, 7 October 2004

As us bloggers have been trying to tell the world for years, there were no WMD and we were led to war on a pack of lies invented by London and Washington to further their own nefarious ends. There is a debate in the UK about why the population are "disillusioned" with politics, all the talking heads are coming up with reasons why people don't vote but none of them really understand. Here's an answer, one you won't find in the mainstream; The reason that most people in the UK are "disillusioned" with politics is that on a sub-conscious level they know that ALL POLITICIANS ARE LYING COCKSUCKERS! Doesn't matter if they are Labour, Tory, LibDem or any one of the other bunch of lying scumbag parties that exist in the UK. Nothing will change until they start addressing REAL issues, like the fact that our money supply system exists to enrich a small group of capitalist swine who care not one whit about the rest of us. Next to that issue all others are secondary, we are being shafted and on some level people know about it which is why they realise that it doesn't matter who they vote for they always get the same bullshit as they had before under a different banner. Same taxi, different driver.

Destroying the Bush administration's main rationale for war against Iraq, the chief US weapons inspector declared yesterday that Saddam Hussein had neither weapons of mass destruction nor programmes to manufacture them at short notice when the US and its allies invaded in March 2003.

Charles Duelfer told the Senate Armed Services Committee he did not believe that "militarily significant" WMD stockpiles were hidden in Iraq.

He also said that Iraq's nuclear programme was nothing compared to what it had been in 1991, at the time of the previous invasion and amounted to less even than in 1998, when the United Nations weapons inspectors were withdrawn.

Tony Blair sought to minimise the damning conclusion of the report, saying: "This case is a far more complicated situation than many people thought.

"Just as I accept that the evidence now is that there were no stockpiles of actual weapons ready to be deployed, others can be honest and accept that the report also shows that sanctions were not working.

"On the contrary, Saddam Hussein was doing the best to get around those sanctions, with every intention of developing those programmes of weapons of mass destruction ... and there were multiple breaches of the United Nations resolutions, which were the legal justification for the conflict."

The report states that the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) "has not found evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD in 2003", but left open the possibility that some weapons existed in Iraq, "although not of a militarily significant capability".

Before the invasion, US Vice-President Dick Cheney even alleged that the Iraqi dictator was "reconstituting" nuclear weapons. But Mr Duelfer dismissed that thesis.

Despite Saddam's attempt to retain some parts of the programme after 1991, "during the following 12 years, Iraq's ability to produce a weapon decayed".

Mr Duelfer was introducing the ISG's 1,000-plus page report, based on visits to suspect sites, the examination of thousands of pages of documents and interviews with former Iraqi officials involved in weapons programmes. Moreover, it found no evidence that Saddam had secretly transferred weapons or components to Syria.

Saddam is said to have told interrogators that his previous possession and use of chemical and biological weapons was a key reason why he stayed in power. WMD enabled him halt Iranian attacks in the 1980-1988 Iran/Iraq war, and deterred the US and its allies from marching on Baghdad in 1991.

However, Mr Duelfer did say that only timely Allied action this year had prevented chemical weapons experts from Saddam's regime from linking up with insurgents in Iraq.

He warned that lethal skills developed by Iraqi scientists "could be transferred to other hands". With WMD proven to be a fiction, and increasing doubts about ties between his regime and Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida, the risk of proliferation of WMD expertise has become the White House's main argument in defence of the invasion.

Wednesday, 6 October 2004

Since 9/11, a great deal of information and speculation have been launched on the Internet about possible Israeli connections to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Several of my own sources have told me that, on an operational level, a few of the 9/11 strategists were Mossad or ex-Mossad people.

Of course, this is a very hot-button issue.

There are those who would view every musing on this subject as a direct anti-Semitic assault on all Jews everywhere.

I can only speak for myself: you don’t need to be a genius to differentiate and separate the Israeli government from some part of that government, the Mossad from some part of the Mossad, all Zionists from certain Zionists.

And you don’t need to have an IQ in the 200 range to know that any of these entities is not The People of Israel. Is not “Jews everywhere.”

Given these basic kindergarten points, one can go on to look at the issue itself: did some faction in Israel produce, or help produce, or try to cover up fore/after-knowledge of, 9/11?

Below, I have re-printed an overview (November 2, 2003) written by Neil Mackay in the online Sunday Herald, a newspaper based in Scotland.

I don’t claim his account is the most complete analysis of the situation. But he asks some of the right questions, and he provides some information.

One point not raised by Mackay: we still do not have evidence presented to the public that shows there really were 19 Arab hijackers on those 9/11 planes. We certainly have no evidence that the hijackers named by the FBI (some of the suicide hijackers appear to be alive now) could have gained the necessary skills to execute the 9/11 aerial maneuvers after, at best, a cursory education in piloting small craft at US private flight schools. Therefore, if Israeli intelligence operatives were tracking Arabs learning how to fly small planes in Florida before 9/11, were these Israeli operatives really gathering useful information about 9/11 prior to 9/11??

Or, perhaps, was this an Israeli intell op that ultimately functioned as a diversion from the truth?

It is a standard practice, in an intell op that is funded well, to leave behind false trails.

If this was the case here, who was being protected by the intell debris of that false trail?

Were these Israeli intell operatives protecting some of their own who actually participated in the strategic planning for 9/11?

Another related issue: to what degree, prior to 9/11, did the US intelligence community knowingly rely on Israeli agents living in the US to provide ongoing data---perhaps for years---on potential Middle East terror cells located in the US? Here I would be talking about standard practice, as in, “Hey, the Israelis are the best at this. They speak the necessary languages. They have the deepest files on these guys. Let’s allow them to spy freely inside the US and report, on a regular basis, back to us (CIA, FBI). In fact, we can’t do this kind of work well. We stink at it. So let’s leave it to the Mossad. Based on their reports, we can claim we ourselves found out all sorts of stuff. We can take credit. We can look good.”

You can imagine what disasters that policy could lead to.

I believe this is one of the many issues left untouched, like a hot potato, by the 9/11 commission.

For example, suppose most or all of the data fed into the US intell machine ABOUT WHO CRASHED THE PLANES ON 9/11 came from Israeli intell sources? Suppose that’s how the names of the hijackers were unearthed so quickly?

In that case, the US intelligence community laid itself open to a conduit that could forward all sorts of lies and cover stories and diversions down its throat.

In that case, the US intelligence community would have a very good reason (among other reasons) for obscuring any type of investigation into Israeli intell people located in the US.

Is this one of the reasons the fired FBI translator, Sibel Edmonds, is under a gag order? Does she know, among other things, how the US intelligence apparatus uses data passed along by Israeli intelligence?

Are there other US intell employees waiting in the wings who could provide an encyclopedia on this subject?

In months and years past, I wrote much on these pages about the evolution of what I call the GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE CARTEL. This is an organically evolving group composed of intell people from many nations, corporations, and private organizations that have been gaining the awareness that they have an agenda SEPARATE from governments. The intelligence cartel comes to view its mission in its own terms---and this cartel, in turn, at a higher level, can be USED by more secretive groups that are seeking the ultimate collapse of nations and the de facto subsuming of nations under a globalist structure---the rule of the many by the few.

9/11 was a watershed moment in that march toward this ultimate goal.

The present official cover story about 9/11 and who directed 9/11 IS an intell op.

Here is the Mackay article:

Five Israelis were seen filming as jet liners ploughed into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 ...

Were they part of a massive spy ring which shadowed the 9/11 hijackers and knew that al-Qaeda planned a devastating terrorist attack on the USA? Neil Mackay investigates

THERE was ruin and terror in Manhattan, but, over the Hudson River in New Jersey, a handful of men were dancing. As the World Trade Centre burned and crumpled, the five men celebrated and filmed the worst atrocity ever committed on American soil as it played out before their eyes.

Who do you think they were? Palestinians? Saudis? Iraqis, even? Al-Qaeda, surely? Wrong on all counts. They were Israelis – and at least two of them were Israeli intelligence agents, working for Mossad, the equivalent of MI6 or the CIA.

Their discovery and arrest that morning is a matter of indisputable fact. To those who have investigated just what the Israelis were up to that day, the case raises one dreadful possibility: that Israeli intelligence had been shadowing the al-Qaeda hijackers as they moved from the Middle East through Europe and into America where they trained as pilots and prepared to suicide-bomb the symbolic heart of the United States. And the motive? To bind America in blood and mutual suffering to the Israeli cause.

After the attacks on New York and Washington, the former Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was asked what the terrorist strikes would mean for US-Israeli relations. He said: “It’s very good.” Then he corrected himself, adding: “Well, it’s not good, but it will generate immediate sympathy [for Israel from Americans].”

If Israel’s closest ally felt the collective pain of mass civilian deaths at the hands of terrorists, then Israel would have an unbreakable bond with the world’s only hyperpower and an effective free hand in dealing with the Palestinian terrorists who had been murdering its innocent civilians as the second intifada dragged on throughout 2001.

It’s not surprising that the New Jersey housewife who first spotted the five Israelis and their white van wants to preserve her anonymity. She’s insisted that she only be identified as Maria. A neighbour in her apartment building had called her just after the first strike on the Twin Towers. Maria grabbed a pair of binoculars and, like millions across the world, she watched the horror of the day unfold.

As she gazed at the burning towers, she noticed a group of men kneeling on the roof of a white van in her parking lot. Here’s her recollection: “They seemed to be taking a movie. They were like happy, you know ... they didn’t look shocked to me. I thought it was strange.”

Maria jotted down the van’s registration and called the police. The FBI was alerted and soon there was a statewide all points bulletin put out for the apprehension of the van and its occupants. The cops traced the number, establishing that it belonged to a company called Urban Moving.

Police Chief John Schmidig said: “We got an alert to be on the lookout for a white Chevrolet van with New Jersey registration and writing on the side. Three individuals were seen celebrating in Liberty State Park after the impact. They said three people were jumping up and down.”

By 4pm on the afternoon of September 11, the van was spotted near New Jersey’s Giants stadium. A squad car pulled it over and inside were five men in their 20s. They were hustled out of the car with guns levelled at their heads and handcuffed.

In the car was $4700 in cash, a couple of foreign passports and a pair of box cutters – the concealed Stanley Knife-type blades used by the 19 hijackers who’d flown jetliners into the World Trade Centre and Pentagon just hours before. There were also fresh pictures of the men standing with the smouldering wreckage of the Twin Towers in the background. One image showed a hand flicking a lighter in front of the devastated buildings, like a fan at a pop concert. The driver of the van then told the arresting officers: “We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.”

His name was Sivan Kurzberg. The other four passengers were Kurzberg’s brother Paul, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner and Omer Marmari. The men were dragged off to prison and transferred out of the custody of the FBI’s Criminal Division and into the hands of their Foreign Counterintelligence Section – the bureau’s anti-espionage squad.

A warrant was issued for a search of the Urban Moving premises in Weehawken in New Jersey. Boxes of papers and computers were removed. The FBI questioned the firm’s Israeli owner, Dominik Otto Suter, but when agents returned to re-interview him a few days later, he was gone. An employee of Urban Moving said his co-workers had laughed about the Manhattan attacks the day they happened. “I was in tears,” the man said. “These guys were joking and that bothered me. These guys were like, ‘Now America knows what we go through.’”

Vince Cannistraro, former chief of operations for counter-terrorism with the CIA, says the red flag went up among investigators when it was discovered that some of the Israelis’ names were found in a search of the national intelligence database. Cannistraro says many in the US intelligence community believed that some of the Israelis were working for Mossad and there was speculation over whether Urban Moving had been “set up or exploited for the purpose of launching an intelligence operation against radical Islamists”.

This makes it clear that there was no suggestion whatsoever from within American intelligence that the Israelis were colluding with the 9/11 hijackers – simply that the possibility remains that they knew the attacks were going to happen, but effectively did nothing to help stop them.

After the owner vanished, the offices of Urban Moving looked as if they’d been closed down in a big hurry. Mobile phones were littered about, the office phones were still connected and the property of at least a dozen clients were stacked up in the warehouse. The owner had cleared out his family home in New Jersey and returned to Israel.

Two weeks after their arrest, the Israelis were still in detention, held on immigration charges. Then a judge ruled that they should be deported. But the CIA scuppered the deal and the five remained in custody for another two months. Some went into solitary confinement, all underwent two polygraph tests and at least one underwent up to seven lie detector sessions before they were eventually deported at the end of November 2001. Paul Kurzberg refused to take a lie detector test for 10 weeks, but then failed it. His lawyer said he was reluctant to take the test as he had once worked for Israeli intelligence in another country.

Nevertheless, their lawyer, Ram Horvitz, dismissed the allegations as “stupid and ridiculous”. Yet US government sources still maintained that the Israelis were collecting information on the fundraising activities of groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Mark Regev, of the Israeli embassy in Washington, would have none of that and he said the allegations were “simply false”. The men themselves claimed they’d read about the World Trade Centre attacks on the internet, couldn’t see it from their office and went to the parking lot for a better view. Their lawyers and the embassy say their ghoulish and sinister celebrations as the Twin Towers blazed and thousands died were due to youthful foolishness.

The respected New York Jewish newspaper, The Forward, reported in March 2002, however, that it had received a briefing on the case of the five Israelis from a US official who was regularly updated by law enforcement agencies. This is what he told The Forward: “The assessment was that Urban Moving Systems was a front for the Mossad and operatives employed by it.” He added that “the conclusion of the FBI was that they were spying on local Arabs”, but the men were released because they “did not know anything about 9/11”.

Back in Israel, several of the men discussed what happened on an Israeli talk show. One of them made this remarkable comment: “The fact of the matter is we are coming from a country that experiences terror daily. Our purpose was to document the event.” But how can you document an event unless you know it is going to happen?

We are now deep in conspiracy theory territory. But there is more than a little circumstantial evidence to show that Mossad – whose motto is “By way of deception, thou shalt do war” – was spying on Arab extremists in the USA and may have known that September 11 was in the offing, yet decided to withhold vital information from their American counterparts which could have prevented the terror attacks.

Following September 11, 2001, more than 60 Israelis were taken into custody under the Patriot Act and immigration laws. One highly placed investigator told Carl Cameron of Fox News that there were “tie-ins” between the Israelis and September 11; the hint was clearly that they’d gathered intelligence on the planned attacks but kept it to themselves.

The Fox News source refused to give details, saying: “Evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It’s classified information.” Fox News is not noted for its condemnation of Israel; it’s a ruggedly patriotic news channel owned by Rupert Murdoch and was President Bush’s main cheerleader in the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq.

Another group of around 140 Israelis were detained prior to September 11, 2001, in the USA as part of a widespread investigation into a suspected espionage ring run by Israel inside the USA. Government documents refer to the spy ring as an “organised intelligence-gathering operation” designed to “penetrate government facilities”. Most of those arrested had served in the Israeli armed forces – but military service is compulsory in Israel. Nevertheless, a number had an intelligence background.

The first glimmerings of an Israeli spying exercise in the USA came to light in spring 2001, when the FBI sent a warning to other federal agencies alerting them to be wary of visitors calling themselves “Israeli art students” and attempting to bypass security at federal buildings in order to sell paintings. A Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) report suggested the Israeli calls “may well be an organised intelligence-gathering activity”. Law enforcement documents say that the Israelis “targeted and penetrated military bases” as well as the DEA, FBI and dozens of government facilities, including secret offices and the unlisted private homes of law enforcement and intelligence personnel.

A number of Israelis questioned by the authorities said they were students from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, but Pnina Calpen, a spokeswoman for the Israeli school, did not recognise the names of any Israelis mentioned as studying there in the past 10 years. A federal report into the so-called art students said many had served in intelligence and electronic signal intercept units during their military service.

According to a 61-page report, drafted after an investigation by the DEA and the US immigration service, the Israelis were organised into cells of four to six people. The significance of what the Israelis were doing didn’t emerge until after September 11, 2001, when a report by a French intelligence agency noted “according to the FBI, Arab terrorists and suspected terror cells lived in Phoenix, Arizona, as well as in Miami and Hollywood, Florida, from December 2000 to April 2001 in direct proximity to the Israeli spy cells”.

The report contended that Mossad agents were spying on Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehi, two of leaders of the 9/11 hijack teams. The pair had settled in Hollywood, Florida, along with three other hijackers, after leaving Hamburg – where another Mossad team was operating close by.

Hollywood in Florida is a town of just 25,000 souls. The French intelligence report says the leader of the Mossad cell in Florida rented apartments “right near the apartment of Atta and al-Shehi”. More than a third of the Israeli “art students” claimed residence in Florida. Two other Israelis connected to the art ring showed up in Fort Lauderdale. At one time, eight of the hijackers lived just north of the town.

Put together, the facts do appear to indicate that Israel knew that 9/11, or at least a large-scale terror attack, was about to take place on American soil, but did nothing to warn the USA. But that’s not quite true. In August 2001, the Israelis handed over a list of terrorist suspects – on it were the names of four of the September 11 hijackers. Significantly, however, the warning said the terrorists were planning an attack “outside the United States”.

The Israeli embassy in Washington has dismissed claims about the spying ring as “simply untrue”. The same denials have been issued repeatedly by the five Israelis seen high-fiving each other as the World Trade Centre burned in front of them.

Their lawyer, Ram Horwitz, insisted his clients were not intelligence officers. Irit Stoffer, the Israeli foreign minister, said the allegations were “completely untrue”. She said the men were arrested because of “visa violations”, adding: “The FBI investigated those cases because of 9/11.”

Jim Margolin, an FBI spokesman in New York, implied that the public would never know the truth, saying: “If we found evidence of unauthorised intelligence operations that would be classified material.” Yet, Israel has long been known, according to US administration sources, for “conducting the most aggressive espionage operations against the US of any US ally”. Seventeen years ago, Jonathan Pollard, a civilian working for the American Navy, was jailed for life for passing secrets to Israel. At first, Israel claimed Pollard was part of a rogue operation, but the government later took responsibility for his work.

It has always been a long-accepted agreement among allies – such as Britain and America or America and Israel – that neither country will jail a “friendly spy” nor shame the allied country for espionage. Chip Berlet, a senior analyst at Boston’s Political Research Associates and an expert in intelligence, says: “It’s a backdoor agreement between allies that says that if one of your spies gets caught and didn’t do too much harm, he goes home. It goes on all the time. The official reason is always visa violation.”

What we are left with, then, is fact sullied by innuendo. Certainly, it seems, Israel was spying within the borders of the United States and it is equally certain that the targets were Islamic extremists probably linked to September 11. But did Israel know in advance that the Twin Towers would be hit and the world plunged into a war without end; a war which would give Israel the power to strike its enemies almost without limit? That’s a conspiracy theory too far, perhaps. But the unpleasant feeling that, in this age of spin and secrets, we do not know the full and unadulterated truth won’t go away. Maybe we can guess, but it’s for the history books to discover and decide.

Monday, 4 October 2004

How this idiot frat-boy ever became president is a beyond me... I guess you just need money to be president of the US, you don't even need to be able to string a few words together or point out some of the places you are bombing on a map. I think it would be funny to see Bush resit a High School final exam just to see what the score is... America, would you please sack this moronic scum bag!

There is one obvious reason that George Bush did so badly in the debate: he wasn't wearing his usual earpiece connecting him to advisors in a back room. Prediction: Next time he'll be wearing it and everyone will be amazed at how much better he does...

An email to Meet The Press asking whether Bush wore an earpiece during the interview received a lightning quick response from Executive Producer Betsy Fischer: "The President was not wearing an earpiece at any time during the interview."

Was Bush wearing an earpiece during today's Meet The Press Interview? Consider the following excerpt (italics added):

Russert: "In light of not finding the weapons of mass destruction, do you believe the war in Iraq is a war of choice or a war of necessity?"

President Bush: "I think that's an interesting question. Please elaborate on that a little bit. A war of choice or a war of necessity? It's a war of necessity. We-- in my judgment, we had no choice when we look at the intelligence I looked at that says the man was a threat."
When Bush said "please elaborate on that a little bit" he did not appear to be asking Russert to elaborate the question. He seemed to be talking almost to himself. Perhaps he was just momentarily confused by an unexpected question. However...

If Bush was wearing an earpiece the odd statement makes more sense. An unseen handler would have had an excellent reason to say "please elaborate on that" to encourage Bush to give more of an answer than "I think that's an interesting question." Seen in this light, when Bush said "please elaborate on that" he mistakenly repeated an instruction from an unseen handler.

This one small incident alone is (obviously) not proof. But there have been others. Consider this quote from a December 15th press conference (italics added):

George Bush: "See, without the tax relief package, there would have been a deficit, but there wouldn't have been the commiserate -- not 'commiserate' -- the kick to our economy that occurred as a result of the tax relief."

Again... he could have just said "not commiserate" by mistake. But why? A less contradictory explanation would be that an unseen handler tried to correct him and instead of understanding the correction, Bush simply repeated what he heard in his earpiece.

Early in the Bush administration, commentators poked fun at his frequent verbal gaffes and his inability to accurately read a teleprompter. Then he seemed to improve. Perhaps Bush simply learned to speak more coherently.

But an earpiece connected to a room of unseen handlers also explains this change.

Friday, 1 October 2004

When Rick and Rosario Ames pleaded guilty to two charges of conspiring to commit espionage, and two of tax fraud on April 28, 1994, the CIA, FBI, and the Oval Office feared that it was just the tip of what had gone terribly wrong - at least 45 operations - explaining why the Justice Department had agreed to the plea-bargains in the first place. When operations of covert government start to unravel, no one can be sure what it will reveal, and where it will stop. The only way to stop the rot is to take serious steps to divert the public's attention away from what is really threatened, and along lines of inquiry which can be controlled to a soft landing for covert organizations and operatives.

The scope of the problem was dramatically demonstrated when President Clinton and DCI James Woolsey visited the former Soviet Union in the summer of 1993. Clinton went there to bolster up President Boris Yeltsin's sagging efforts to reclaim 170 Russian ICBMs from the independence-seeking Ukraine, while Woolsey wanted to engage in a bit of Agency damage control, using former Leningrad station chief Freddie Woodruff, a suspected mole, as a guinea pig in a showdown with Yevgeny Primakov's Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), the KGB's successor. Woodruff was then in Georgia, assisting equally beleaguered Eduard Shevardnadze's intelligence service assess the level of Russian infilitration of the country's north. Both Georgia and Ukraine were paranoid about Russia trying to reassert control over them.

At a lunch in honor of Woolsey in Moscow on August 9th, Primakov, a protege of the deceased Yuri Andropov, showed his complete opposition to what Clinton was attempting by comparing the Ukrainians to reckless children who had gotten their hands on dangerous weapons, and were experimenting with what they could do with them. Clinton foreign policy adviser Strobe Talbot has explained in The Russia Hand that Primakov's patronizing attitude towards them was matched with a mistrust that Washington was trying to encircle Russia by coopting its former republics and allies. (p. 80) To make this less likely, the SVR then assassinated Woodruff with a single shot to the head as he was travelling along the border with Russia, indicating in the process that he was not the mole. Woolsey then had the unpleasant task of escorting Woodruff's body back to the States

Clinton was most interested in containing the scandal for fear that the activities emanating from Mena's Intermountain Regional Airport, as the killings of whistle blowers Paul Wilcher and Luther 'Jerry' Parks had demonstrated, would lead to him, and the Agency was not far behind, arranging the murders of Olof Palme assassination suspect Viktor Gunnarsson on December 4th, and Mrs.Catherine Miller, mother of the former girl friend of probable fall guy for the Gunnarsson shooting, former North Carolina policeman L. C. Underwood, a few days later. The mole hunters pursuing Ames had to wait until these damage-control operations were well in place, and Clinton's National Security Adviser Tony Lake could stage the ruse that Ames was advising the President about his Black Sea Initiative for combating the drugs trade before making his arrest on President's Day, February 21, 1994.

Clinton had all the back channel connections necessary to arrange the cover up of Ames's spying: intelligence expert George Tenet on the National Security Council (NSC) to take advantage of his work with the Senate Intelligence Committee, former CIA station chief in Stockholm Jennone Walker and now also on the NSC to alert Langley, especially chief mole hunter now and chief of the Soviet division's CI Group back then, Paul Redmond, of what was at stake, and Clinton crony and now Deputy Attorney General Webster Hubbell to make the necessary arrangements. It was a team which knew what bureaucratic fights to initiate, and which ones to win.

Tenet knew were all the bodies were buried, having been an aide to Senator John Heinz, serving on the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee during Reagan's second term when the operations occurred, and its staff director during George H. W. Bush's presidency when they had to be covered up. In 1993, he moved into the Clinton White House where he established such a reputation for getting things done that he became CIA's Deputy Director when Woolsey resigned, though he had no intelligence experience or background of the usual kind. (Thomas Power, Intelligence Wars, p. 378) Little wonder that when Clinton's sharpest critics started making up their lists of hits he had apparently ordered, the death of Heinz, apparently a player in the *October Surprise', headed them. Walker did her job so well that she was soon made American Ambassador to the Czech Republic. Hubbell hung around long enough to get the necessary cover ups going before going to jail himself.

Watergate had proved a salutory lesson for all concerned - as was demonstrated by how the Iran-Contra scandal was handled. If responsible authorities don't seem at least to be responding positively to alleged wrong-doing - getting on top of the story - they would be suspected of stone-walling necessary public inquiries - what finished off Nixon, and threatened Clinton. Public officials are not given the private protection of assumed innocence, and a need of proving them guilty beyond a reasonable doubt before they can be judged. If cries of scandal emerge, officials are seen to be guilty unless they can prove otherwise - what leads to a pre-emptive approach to charges of malfeasance in office.

Yet, if such an approach is adopted too vigorously to suspected scandal, all kinds of things can turn out to be unexpected disasters. Even the seemingly most innocent and routine actions - like an agent having lunch with an enemy operative or a double agent meeting his handler - can turn out to be part of yet another plot, and if investigated, can provide even more dangerous blowback. Highly complicated secret operations can be compromised at almost any level, and to determine who and how the operation was betrayed is a most laborious, problematic, upsetting exercise, explaining why intelligence organizations have avoided them if at all possible.

This introduction seems most called for when one considers the most authoritative explanation of Ames's spying - what Thomas Powers, the biographer of DCI Richard Helms, and his greatest apologist, supplied in a review of four books about the scandal, entitled "No Laughing Matter", for the August 10, 1995 issue of The New York Review of Books. Powers concluded that such a scandal was ultimately bound to happen to CIA, especially since the signs of Rick's spying could not have been more obvious, and more destructive in its consequences for his former Agency colleagues, particularly DCI Woolsey, though no one should ever consider any serious case of alleged spies or spying closed. The extreme secrecy under which Ames operated, as the title of the review indicated, almost lost the Cold War for the West, Powers concluded, but just how he never explained nor did David Wise, the most revealing observer of the works under review.

All this is the worst kind of history writing - where everything is explained by using a rear-view mirror approach to what happened. Of course, after motoring along with the Ameses for nine years, there was plenty to be seen back there, but the meaning of it, except for the wealth they had amassed, and the actual American spies the Soviets had apparently disposed of, still remains a mystery. How Ames almost lost the Cold War, and cost Woolsey his career are never explained. It was not on Woolsey's watch that Ames did all his spying, and when it was fully disclosed, the DCI resigned. While Ames's spying might have seemed as clear as day, Powers still had to rely upon a possible unnamed defector that Walter Pincus of The Washington Post suggested to close the case - what Powers earlier asserted should never be done.

The Ames case is simply not one that could have been predicted, made the Cold War much more perilous, and has been adequately explained, as Powers has claimed. Ames had been performing fairly well until Operation Courtship got going - an operation increasingly geared towards catching the Soviets flat-footed in some deep covert mission, thanks to feedback, real and contrived, from double agents back in the USSR. And they were mostly sleepers, expected to pop up at just the right moment with some alarming or disarming claim. It was this threat which forced Ames's betrayal - not any kind of personality fault - but there was little chance that others would notice it because of the complexity of what was being planned.

Consider when Ames made a hurried, unannounced visit to Viktor Cherkashin, the KGB counterintelligence chief in the Washington Embassy, on February 14, 1986 after he had been debriefed by defecting double agent Oleg Gordievsky about ongoing operations. Now Ames had identified for Moscow Gordievsky as an MI6 and CIA asset the previous June 13th., but he had still been allowed to make a miraculous escape from the USSR five weeks later so he could provide Ames with new input when he was debriefed. The KGB was already suspicious of Gordievsky's bona fides because of his activities in the London residency, and Ames had confirmed his spying for London and Washington, though, they, of course, did not know it then.

Ames apparently told Cherkashin that the assassination of statsminister Olof Palme in Stockholm (Operation Tree) before the March-scheduled, NATO Anchor Express Exercise was to trigger a non-nuclear showdown with Moscow - what KGB FCD head Vladimir Kryuchkov took the necessary countermeasures to prevent, and KGB Chief Viktor Chebrikov unprecedentedly explained to the world's media just before Palme was assassinated.

Now Washington and London had no sure-fire way of knowing that either Ames was the mole or that Chebrikov was telling the truth. Quite possibly, Ames was told to tell the CI chief in the Embassy that the planned showdown with Moscow had been scrubbed - what was intended to leave Moscow flat-footed when the assassination occurred - and Ames felt obliged to tell the Soviets what was really in the works to prevent the world from going up in smoke. Then the FBI agents involved in the whole process - Operation Courtship - had not informed superiors of the unscheduled visit - what may have been just more of the plan to fool the Soviets or due to additional spying for Moscow - what it turned out to be, by the Bureau's Robert Hanssen.. And there were similar possibilities and problems all the way along the line, from stations in the USSR to double agent handlers in Courtship in the USA.

After the operations had been attempted, Anglo-American covert government was somewhat in a quandry to determine what had happened. While the Stockholm shooting had gone ahead as planned, the showdown with the Soviets at sea never materialized. For American and British counterintelligence experts, the problem, if there was one, was to determine what had gone wrong, and why. The main objective, the assassination of Palme, had been achieved, as there was no way that Moscow could have prevented it - any warning would have been interpreted as Soviet provocation towards Sweden, probably intended to set up its own pre-emptive strike, as the Swedish Security Service, Säpo, was claiming.

The signing of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty with Moscow leader Mikhail Gorbachev thefollowing year, establishing the zero option about intermediate-range missiles, put to rest many of the fears which had spawned the plot for a non-nuclear showdown with the Soviets in the first place. Then the Soviet leader had conveniently confused Washington by taking along Kryuchkov, the official who foiled the coup, as part of the Soviet delegation. Kryuchkov, thanks to information that Gordievsky had supplied Cambridge historian Christopher Andrew about the Kremlin's alleged paranoia about an Anglo-American first strike, had long been an object of railery in the West, but Gorbachev had the last laugh, especially when Kryuchkov indicated to DCI Robert Gates that Gordievsky might well have been the mole since he was promised "a good job with a lot of security" if he returned to the Soviet Union. (Quoted from Christopher Andrew, For the President's Eyes Only, p. 499.)

Then the arrest, and punishment, usually by execution, of all the compromised Soviet double agents was not something immediate, and obvious to Western CI officials. Given the compartmentalized character of these operations, there was no single authority responsible for assessing the damage, and its sources. Most of the double agents had simply failed to perform their assigned or expected tasks, and it was only later that the Agency learned that they had been compromised or operating under KGB control.

Sergei Motorin, for example, failed to call his girl friend in the States to tell her, in code, that the Soviets had been caught unawares by the Stockholm shooting, though the KGB had regained control of his actions due to a number of reasons long before the assassination. He was arrested the day after he last saw his US handlers, leaving them uncertain about when and why he had been compromised. It was only a year after the Stockhom shooting that he was tried, and executed.

Valery Martynov was thought to be in an ideal position to trigger deadly measures when he accompanied defector Vitaly Yurchenko back to Moscow as part of his honor guard, only to discover when he arrived that he had been betrayed. It was a year and a half later when he was executed that his handlers learned of his fate.

Others, like the GRU's Major General Dimitri Polyakov - who DCI Woolsey compared to the legendary Oleg Penkovsky during the Cuban Missile Crisis - and the KGB's Boris Yuzhin, were no longer active, so Washinton only learned for sure of their betrayals when their punishments were announced. Polyakov was arrested 15 months after Operation Tree had occurred. It was in 1990 that the Soviets announced that Polyakov had been caught, only later admitting that he had been executed on March 15,1988. Yuzhin was sentenced to 15 years in a gulag for high treason just before the Palme assassination, indicating to the ignorant that it had not been the cause of his incarceration.

And the Soviets took all kinds of steps to hide what it knew and how, especially making it appear that spies' exposure was not the result of a mole, and what countermeasures it was taking against the spies in their midst, despite Ames's claims to the contrary. The most confusing efforts were the handiwork of 'Mr. X', someone feigning to be the Lisbon-based double agent Gennady Smetanin, who explained that exposures had been the result of the KGB tapping all the messages the CIA sentand received at its communications center in Warrenton, Va. - what had apparently led to Gennady Varenik's capture but not Smetanin's.

Then the KGB had supplied its own mole, code-name EASTBOUND, to keep alive confidence in Operation ABSORB, the cargo container filled with advanced technology being shipped across the USSRto keep track of Moscow's most secret messages and responses while the countdown to Palme's murder was taking place. Only after the Stockholm shooting did the CIA learn that the container had been seized on January 24th, and on May 7th, Erik Sites was arrested while trying to make contact with EASTBOUND. "The CIA would not learn until several years later that EASTBOUND had been a 'dangle' ," Pete Earley explained in Confessions of A Spy, "a KGB officer who had volunteered to spy specifically to entrap a CIA officer and pass along bad information." (p. 200)

In this context, the use of lie-detectors on any suspected spy, whatever their limitations in discovering the truth, is even more unreliable than usual because almost everything is prone to uncertainty, anxiety, and deception - explaining why the Agency never relied upon it in Ames's case, even after he was arrested. In fact, it agreed to the plea-bargains before Ames had really admitted anything. It was only after the plea-bargains had been accepted that Ames told the FBI that he had given the names of every double-agent he knew of to the KGB during his years of spying.

While Woolsey and Clinton were confident that this was the end of the matter, they were sadly mistaken. The DCI had already ordered the CIA's Inspector General, Frederick Hitz, to investigate how the Agency had handled the Ames case, and Richard Haver, director of the intelligence community's management staff, to do a detailed damage assessment of his spying, while the House and Senate Intelligence launched their own inquiries into his spying. Haver and DDCI Admiral William Studeman had been molehunters in the Navy during Secretary John Lehman's plan to take advantage of Palme's assassination by triggering a non-nuclear conclusion to the Cold War, so they were completely versed in what the dangers had been in trying it. (For more details, see Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew, Blind Man's Bluff, p. 299ff.)

"It's like turning over rocks," Haver said cryptically when he announced its report. "Each rock has more and more crap under it." (Quoted from James Adams, Sellout, p. 248.) Woolsey also asked an outside panel of experts, headed by former Senate Intelligence Committee staffer Jeffery H. Smith, to give a preliminary assessment of what it thought he had betrayed, and it issued a 32-page report in July, corroborating the counterintelligence lapses that allowed Ames to do his spying, and he was revealingduring his three, weekly debriefings at the Alexandria Dentention Center. Woolsey immediately put its obvious recommendations about security into effect. For good measure, Ames had endured his grilling by Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Dennis DeConcini on August 5, 1994 without disclosing anything too embarrassing about himself or the Agency

Instead of the crisis being over, though, it resumed with renewed destructiveness, thanks to the release of information about operations, and interviews with the principal officials concerned, especially Ames, that the Bureau, Agency, and Justice Department permitted with investigators writing on the subject. Details surrounding Operation Tree were discussed in ways which pointed to something big happening at the end of February 1986. Many of the officials responsible discussed what was going on, and the cover ups in ways which were highly embarrassing to various agencies, especially the CIA. It was as if the intelligence community was incapable of ever learning how to conduct itself in a secure fashion.

The books, starting with Adams's and ending with Earley's, were just a rising tide of revelations about operations by loose-lipped officials which never should have seen the light of day. The offending CIA officials were DDOs Clair George, Richard Stolz, and Hugh 'Ted' Price; ADDO Thomas Tweeten; Soviet Division chiefs Burton Gerber, Milton Bearden and David Forden; Rome COS Alan Wolfe and DCOS Jack Gower; CIC chief Gardner 'Gus' Hathaway; and many others. Wise, in "Author's Note" at the back of his book, mentioned that he had conducted more than 450 interveiws with almost 200 persons in his research, a good number of whom were former CIA officers, but only a few, including Bearden, were willing to be identified. "The list of those who prefer to remain anonymous is much longer." (p. 337)

These matters got even worse when Earley researched his book. During eleven sessions in July, Earley was allowed to interview Ames without the government's knowledge or approval for three to four hours at a time, and with a tape recorder. "During our nightly session," Earley explained, "Ames answered every question that I asked. No subjects were off limits, including questions about classified information." (p. 6) Then Ames supplied Earley with a letter of introduction, dated 22 September 1994, to anyone he might want to interview, calling upon officials in Russia who worked with him to provide Earley with any help they could. (See copy opposite the beginning of the Prologue.)

And Earley used it for all it was worth, though the Russians declined to tell him their side of the story, as a most knowledgeable KGB officer explained: "There are things that have never come out about this case. There are still secrets that only a few know." (Quoted from p. 14.) Earley offered no guesses about what they might have been, leaving the questions to readers to resolve.

Still, there were enough secrets revealed to give the public a better idea about what had been planned, and what had gone wrong. Wise, for example, made a big thing about the significance of Motorin's telephone calls to the States, and their stopping with such deadly consequences even to his handlers James Stassinos and Mike Morton: "But around February, the last telephone contact took place, and soon after, Motorin was arrested in Moscow on his way to or from a meeting with a CIA officer." (p. 257) Wise also indicated that Yuzhin was arrested by the KGB before Chebrikov made his announcement about all the double agent operations having been closed down. (p. 261)

Earley wrote that Polyakov was arrested a year later than first claimed, July 1985, indicating that the Soviets were punishing all suspected double agents for the risks the USSR was subjected to, as a matter of policy. Operation ABSORB was known to have been compromised in February 1986 since the electronic equipment stopped functioning, though the Agency still thought that the 'dangle', EASTBOUND, was a legitimate source for several more years. (p. 197ff.) Then Earley spilled the beans about the rigmarole that 'Mr. X' put the Agency's Redmond through (pp. 198ff., esp. p. 287) - what was particularly embarrassing for Woolsey because of his promotion of him for his mole work.

Little wonder that Woolsey hit the overhead when he learned of what was going on behind his back. Using the issuance of Inspector General Hitz's report on the Ames case in September as his club, Woolsey hit every possible member of the Operations Directorate he could lay his hands on with a letter of reprimand for talking out of turn. The list was headed by the current DO Ted Price who was only interested in finding "out just how much damage he (Ames) had done." (Mark Riebling, Wedge, p. 442) The inclusion of George, Gerber, and Stolz in the list was a telltale sign that it was the DO which was responsible for Ames becoming a Soviet spy, and for the need of covering it up.

In fact, the only person to receive a reprimand who was not in the DO was Hathaway, and he was censured for his cocksure assurances about the Agency being mole free to the Senate Intelligence Committee just when Operation Tree was commencing - another tidbit that Wise picked up from talkative associates of Ames: "There has never been an agent of the Soviets in the center of the CIA itself." (Quoted from p. 195) Thereafter, Hathaway spent much of his time, trying to make sure it stayed that way.

DDO Price and ADDO Tweeten, the only aforementioned officials who were still working for the Agency,were reprimanded rather than retired so that they would be forced to clean up what remained of the fiasco - especially the unsolved murder of Palme suspect Viktor Gunnarsson. Tweeten had served as CIA liaison with Operation Tree's action officer, the NSC's infamous Ollie North. Price had been Hathaway's deputy at CIC until the cover up of the scandal had been completed, moving over to the Operations Division as ADDO in 1991.

For not having laid a glove on any of the revelant DCIs, or members of the Office of Security for their role in the scandal - as Hitz had suggested, but not being at liberty to explain why - Woolsey created such a firestorm of opposition to his continuing tenure as DCI that his future rather than the Agency's became the topic of the day. Once the furore over the reprimands had subsided, and the Christmas holidays were in progress, Woolsey suddenly announced his resignation in the hope that it would finally draw a line under the decade-old scandal.

Enlightenment

Do you feel like you're living in some Orwellian nightmare? Or perhaps you feel as if you're plugged into The Matrix? Well if so, you've come to the right place. No matter how messed up you thought the world was, by the time you've finished reading some of the things I've found on my travels in Cyberspace you'll realise that 1984 was just a typo!

A note to the non-ravers out there: codshit is
NOT a derogatory or insulting term and bears no relation in offensiveness to its four-letter cousin, it's a word used to describe the nonsense that people sometimes talk when they are off their heads. To understand what codshit is watch the film Human Traffic.

Comments are welcome, but before you waste perfectly useful energy abusing me please take a moment to reflect on the basic right we all have to express ourselves!

Please remember that I am not telling you what to think or believe, take everything you read here with a large grain of salt!

Wisdom

If you confront the Universe with good intentions in your heart it will reflect that and reward your intent... usually... It just doesn't always do it in the way you expect.
.: G'kar :.

So there, we have figured it out, go back to bed America, your government has figured out how it all transpired. Go back to bed America, your government is in control again. Here, here's American Gladiators. Watch this, shut up. Go back to bed America, here's American Gladiators. Here's 56 channels of it. Watch these pituitary retards bang their fuckin skulls together and congratulate you on living in the land of freedom. Here you go America, you are free... to do as we tell you.
.: Bill Hicks :.

Let there be no doubt that the people of the free world are engaged in a war... In the next few years, we are either going to see the people of the free world rise up against these fascists, now setting the stage for global war, or we are going to see the end of democracy as we know it with martial law the end result.
.: David Shayler :.

Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.
.: Albert Einstein :.